I was born and breed in Southern California and I spend most of my time now making graphite drawings. I also work with my friend Naheed Simjee on a range of really exciting projects with artists through our company SIMJEE TEXTOR.

I would describe my work as hyperrealistic graphite drawing. The theme of the work varies but I often include elements like smoke, filtered light, negative space, water and rocks to create organic uncommon images of natural environments.

Useless Struggle / 46" x 35.75" / graphite on paper

Describe your process for creating new work.

The initial stages involve some tinkering in photoshop to make adjustments and to get a sense for what the finished product will look like. It is a lot easier to erase clouds or add more trees when you are working on a computer than to hand draw it. Deciding on the scale of the work is an important part of the process and I'm slowly creeping towards making larger and larger work although I also enjoy the intimate scale of the smaller works.

Working routine? Music? Time of day?

I'm a night person so I'm usually the most productive between 10pm and 2am but if I'm working on a show I'm drawing all day every day and I become a bit obsessive about it. Music, podcasts, Netflix or something is always playing since the work can become monotonous and this part of the process does not involve a lot of decision making. Sometimes I get a song stuck in my head and play it on repeat until I finish the piece so I'll end up listening to the same song a couple hundred times in a row. That military torture technique would never work on me.

Smoking Ledge / 20" x 14" / graphite on paper

Influences?

Storytelling and strong narratives, chain emails of crazy photos from around the world and the internet. I'm interested in the general pursuit of discovery. The amount of information out there these days can be overwhelming but it is fascinating how one subject can lead to another and in turn, how they relate to each other.

I'm 24, I was born and raised in the bay area, where I graduated from
the indomitable San Francisco Art Institute in 2010. Currently I live
in New Haven Connecticut where I'm wrapping up my MFA at Yale.
(www.TomBetthauser.com)

How would you describe your work to someone?

Right now I just say that I make landscapes. It's vague, but I like
the way it makes people (including myself) interact with the work, and
it leaves me with a lot of room to explore the core of what I'm
interested in.

Detail

Detail

Detail

Detail

Describe your process for creating new work.

I like the idea of creating a world from the ground up. I start very
abstractly, with large areas of dark and light, and then try to pull a
blank landscape out of that. Once that's built I'm free to explore and
add elements of content as necessary.

Oakland based artist John Casey just opened Hands and Pants over at Swarm Gallery last Saturday, Oct 1st. We meant to add this preview last week, but the fire kept us pretty busy away from updating the site. In any case, check out these great works. A solid group of artists John collaborated with.

Hands & Pants is a broader collaborative venture, employing over 40 of John's artist peers. John drew either hands or pants (blue-jean-clad waist-down shod figures) or both, in his simple pen-and-ink style on 8"x10" Bristol paper. An invited artist was given the hands and/or pants and asked to complete the figure in any way the artist saw fit.

I draw people from direct observation. The conversation I have with them during the portrait sitting along with the different expressions and emotions they convey inform how the portraits look. I depict an array of attitudes that will give the viewer insight as to the true nature of the sitter thereby creating an image that holds significance beyond their name and identity alone. They are essentially about how we get to ‘know’ someone, how we connect and what we honestly see when we look at a person. People are fluid creatures that do not sit still and their faces act as a window into a constantly changing stew of thoughts and emotions. What I see in a few hours can say so much about a person’s entire life. They capture so much more than a photograph.

Influences?

Right now I am super interested in the animation work of Chuck Jones and Max Fleisher.

We interviewed this SF based artist a couple years back. Well, he now has a new website featuring his new drawings of sourced material he takes from google and youtube which he juxtaposes with alternate movie titles, tv show titles or characters, creating new fantasy entertainment teams. ~read the mini interview

I don't think at this point it needs to be written since the last update to Fecal Face was a long time ago, but...

I, John Trippe, have put this baby Fecal Face to bed. I'm now focusing my efforts on running ECommerce at DLX which I'm very excited about... I guess you can't take skateboarding out of a skateboarder.

It was a great 15 years, and most of that effort can still be found within the site. Click around. There's a lot of content to explore.

I'm not sure how many people are lucky enough to have The San Francisco Giants 3 World Series trophies put on display at their work for the company's employees to enjoy during their lunch break, but that's what happened the other day at Deluxe. So great.

When works of art become commodities and nothing else, when every endeavor becomes “creative” and everybody “a creative,” then art sinks back to craft and artists back to artisans—a word that, in its adjectival form, at least, is newly popular again. Artisanal pickles, artisanal poems: what’s the difference, after all? So “art” itself may disappear: art as Art, that old high thing. Which—unless, like me, you think we need a vessel for our inner life—is nothing much to mourn.

Hard-working artisan, solitary genius, credentialed professional—the image of the artist has changed radically over the centuries. What if the latest model to emerge means the end of art as we have known it? --continue reading

"[Satire] is important because it brings out the flaws we all have and throws them up on the screen of another person," said Turner. “How they react sort of shows how important that really is.” Later, he added, "Charlie took a hit for everybody." -read on

NYC --- A new graffiti abatement program put forth by the police commissioner has beat cops carrying cans of spray paint to fill in and cover graffiti artists work in an effort to clean up the city --> Many cops are thinking it's a waste of resources, but we're waiting to see someone make a project of it. Maybe instructions for the cops on where to fill-in?

The NYPD is arming its cops with cans of spray paint and giving them art-class-style lessons to tackle the scourge of urban graffiti, The Post has learned.

Shootings are on the rise across the city, but the directive from Police Headquarters is to hunt down street art and cover it with black, red and white spray paint, sources said... READ ON

We haven't been featuring many interviews as of late. Let's change that up as we check in with a few local San Francisco artists like Kevin Earl Taylor here whom we studio visited back in 2009 (PHOTOS & VIDEO). It's been awhile, Kevin...

If you like guns and boobs, head on over to the Shooting Gallery; just don't expect the work to be all cheap ploys and hot chicks. With Make Stuff by Peter Gronquist (Portland) in the main space and Morgan Slade's Snake in the Eagle's Shadow in the project space, there is plenty spectacle to be had, but if you look just beyond it, you might actually get something out of the shows.

Fifty24SF opened Street Anatomy, a new solo show by Austrian artist Nychos a week ago last Friday night. He's been steadily filling our city with murals over the last year, with one downtown on Geary St. last summer, and new ones both in the Haight and in Oakland within the last few weeks, but it was really great to see his work up close and in such detail.

Congrats on our buddies at Needles and Pens on being open and rad for 11 years now. Mission Local did this little short video featuring Breezy giving a little heads up on what Needles and Pens is all about.

Matt Wagner recently emailed over some photos from The Hellion Gallery in Tokyo, who recently put together a show with AJ Fosik (Portland) called Beast From a Foreign Land. The gallery gave twelve of Fosik's sculptures to twelve Japanese artists (including Hiro Kurata who is currently showing in our group show Salt the Skies) to paint, burn, or build upon.

Backwoods Gallery in Melbourne played host to a huge group exhibition a couple of weeks back, with "Gold Blood, Magic Weirdos" Curated by Melbourne artist Sean Morris. Gold Blood brought together 25 talented painters, illustrators and comic artists from Australia, the US, Singapore, England, France and Spain - and marked the end of the Magic Weirdos trilogy, following shows in Perth in 2012 and London in 2013.

San Francisco based Fecal Pal Jeremy Fish opened his latest solo show Hunting Trophies at LA's Mark Moore Gallery last week to massive crowds and cabin walls lined with imagery pertaining to modern conquest and obsession.

Well, John Felix Arnold III is at it again. This time, he and Carolyn LeBourgios packed an entire show into the back of a Prius and drove across the country to install it at Superchief Gallery in NYC. I met with him last week as he told me about the trip over delicious burritos at Taqueria Cancun (which is right across the street from FFDG and serves what I think is the best burrito in the city) as the self proclaimed "Only overweight artist in the game" spilled all the details.

Ever Gold opened a new solo show by NYC based Henry Gunderson a couple Saturday nights ago and it was literally packed. So packed I couldn't actually see most of the art - but a big crowd doesn't seem like a problem. I got a good laugh at what I would call the 'cock climbing wall' as it was one of the few pieces I could see over the crowd. I haven't gotten a chance to go back and check it all out again, but I'm definitely going to as the paintings that I could get a peek at were really high quality and intruiguing. You should do the same.

The paintings in the show are each influenced by a musician, ranging from Freddy Mercury, to Madonna, to A Tribe Called Quest and they are so stylistically consistent with each musician's persona that they read as a cohesive body of work with incredible variation. If you told me they were each painted by a different person, I would not hesitate to believe you and it's really great to see a solo show with so much variety. The show is fun, poppy, very well done, and absolutely worth a look and maybe even a listen.

With rising rent in SF and knowing mostly other young artists without capitol, I desired a way to live rent free, have a space to do my craft, and get to see more of the world. Inspired by the many historical artists who have longed similar longings I discovered the beauty of artist residencies. Lilo runs Adhoc Collective in Vienna which not only has a fully equipped artists creative studio, but an indoor halfpipe, and private artist quarters. It was like a modern day castle or skate cathedral. It exists in almost a utopic state, totally free to those that apply and come with a real passion for both art and skateboarding

I just wanted to share with you a piece I recently finished which took me 4 years to complete. Titled "How To Lose Yourself Completely (The September Issue)", it consists of a copy of the September 2007 issue of Vogue magazine (the issue they made the documentary about) with all faces masked with a sharpie, and everything else entirely whited out. 840 pages of fun. -Bryan Schnelle

Jeremy Fish opens Hunting Trophies tonight, Saturday April 5th, at the Los Angeles based Mark Moore Gallery. The show features new work from Fish inside the "hunting lodge" where viewers climb inside the head of the hunter and explore the history of all the animals he's killed.

Beautiful piece entitled "The Albatross and the Shipping Container", Ink on Paper, Mounted to Panel, 47" Diameter, by San Francisco based Martin Machado now on display at FFDG. Stop in Saturday (1-6pm) to view the group show "Salt the Skies" now running through April 19th. 2277 Mission St. at 19th.

For some reason I thought it would be a good idea to quit my job, move out of my house, leave everything and travel again. So on August 21, 2013 I pushed a canoe packed full of gear into the headwaters of the Mississippi River in Lake Itasca, Minnesota, along with four of my best friends. Exactly 100 days later, I arrived at a marina near the Gulf of Mexico in a sailboat.

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